Around the Tea-Table

by T. De Witt Talmage

My congratulations to those who are nearly done with the nuisances of this world. Give your staff to your little grandson to ride horse on. You are going to be young again, and you will have no need of crutches. May the clouds around the setting sun be golden, and such as to lead the "weather-wise" to prophesy a dear morning!

Quizzle.—But, Governor Wiseman, does it not give you a little uneasiness in this day of so much talk about cremation as to what will become of your body after you leave this sphere?

At this point Doctor Heavyasbricks wiped his spectacles, as though he could not see well, and interrupted the conversation by saying, "Cremation! Cremation! What's that?" Sitting at the head of the table, I explained that it was the reduction of the deceased human body through fire into ashes to be preserved in an urn. "Ah! ah!" said Doctor Heavyasbricks, "I had the idea, from the sound of that word 'cremation,' it must be something connected with cream. I will take a little more of that delicious bovine liquid in my tea, if you please," said the doctor as he passed his cup toward the urn, adding, to the lady of the house, "I hope that urn you have your hand on has nothing to do with cremation." This explanation having been made, Governor Wiseman proceeded to answer the question of Quizzle:

No; I have no uneasiness about my body after I have left it. The idea you speak of will never be carried out. I know that the papers are ardently discussing whether or not it will be best to burn the bodies of the dead, instead of burying them. Scientific journals contend that our cemeteries are the means of unhealthy exhalations, and that cremation is the only safe way of disposing of the departed. Some have advocated the chemical reduction of the physical system.

I have, as yet, been unable to throw myself into a mood sufficiently scientific to appreciate this proposal. It seems to me partly horrible and partly ludicrous. I think that the dead populations of the world are really the most quiet and unharmful. They make no war upon us, and we need make no war upon them. I am very certain that all the damage we shall ever do this world, will be while we are animate. It is not the dead people that are hard to manage, but the living. Some whistle to keep their courage up while going along by graveyards; I whistle while moving among the wide awake. Before attempting this barbaric disposal of the human form as a sanitary improvement, it would be better to clear the streets and "commons" of our cities of their pestiferous surroundings. Try your cremation on the dogs and cats with extinct animation.

We think Greenwood is healthier than Broadway, and Laurel Hill than Chestnut street, Père la Chaise than Champs Elysées. Urns, with ashes scientifically prepared, may look very well in Madras or Pekin, but not in a Christian country. Not having been able to shake off the Bible notions about Christian burial, we adhere to the mode that was observed when devout men carried Stephen to his burial. Better not come around here with your chemical apparatus for the reduction of the human body. I give fair warning that if your philosopher attempts such a process on my bones, and I am of the same way of thinking as now, he will be sorry for it.

But I have no fear that I shall thus be desecrated by my surviving friends. I have more fear of epitaphs. I do not wonder that people have sometimes dictated the inscription on their own tombstones when I see what inappropriate lines are chiseled on many a slab. There needs to be a reformation in epitaphiology.

People often ask me for appropriate inscriptions for the graves of their dead. They tell the virtues of the father, or wife, or child, and want me to put in compressed shape all that catalogue of excellences.

Of course I fail in the attempt. The story of a lifetime cannot be chiseled by the stone-cutter on the side of a marble slab. But it is not a rare thing to go a few months after by the sacred spot and find that the bereft friends, unable to get from others an epitaph sufficiently eulogistic, have put their own brain and heart to work and composed a rhyme. Now, the most unfit sphere on earth for an inexperienced mind to exercise the poetic faculty is in epitaphiology. It does very well in copy-books, but it is most unfair to blot the resting-place of the dead with unskilled poetic scribble. It seems to me that the owners of cemeteries and graveyards should keep in their own hand the right to refuse inappropriate and ludicrous epitaph.

Nine-tenths of those who think they can write respectable poetry are mistaken. I do not say that poesy has passed from the earth, but it does seem as if the fountain Hippocrene had been drained off to run a saw-mill. It is safe to say that most of the home-made poetry of graveyards is an offence to God and man.